New CIO Beth Niblock starts from scratch to overhaul
Detroit's 'fundamentally broken' IT system

Beth Niblock's first impression of Detroit's IT: "Almost everything needs to be overhauled."

Bugs in the system

• The city can't use IT
networks to share information between police precincts.

• The city is unable to manage
jails and electronic ticketing through an IT system.

• Police, fire and EMS vehicles
lack adequate equipment.

•
The city cannot efficiently make payroll: It uses multiple
systems, with each check cut costing $62.

• The city cannot collect delinquent property
taxes online; Wayne County has to do it because city does not
have the systems.

• City
employees cannot open Word documents easily; not every
department has the same software or version.

• The city lacks adequate backup
systems.

• IT isn't used to
running accounting: 70 percent of accounting journal entries
are booked manually.

• The
city lacks an effective system for permits and licensing: Its
building permits system is more than 10 years old, and the
fire department's system for inspections is more than 20
years old.

• Malfunctioning
parking meters are rampant; half of all meters are
broken.

• The city can't sync
smartphones with city calendars.

• Payroll, HR, and financial data and systems
cannot be integrated.

First things first: Beth Niblock has no control over the parking meters.

And yes, the city's new chief information officer has received her share of parking tickets since moving to Detroit from Louisville, Ky., in February. More than half the city's meters are broken, which made paying for parking in the middle of the polar vortex a challenge.

"I'm standing on the street blowing on my credit card, trying to make it work, and going, 'OK, I just have to take the parking ticket,' " she said, laughing.

She whips out her cellphone to show off a photo of her car very obviously not blocking a crosswalk despite the ticket she received.

But that's an entirely different IT fish to fry. First, she just has to get City Hall functioning.

"It really was kind of more fundamentally broken than I thought it was," Niblock said of the city's information technology infrastructure. "Almost everything needs to be overhauled."

Niblock sneaked her first peek under Detroit's hood last year as part of an IT task force organized by the White House. She joined the CIOs from Boston, New Orleans, Chicago and Raleigh, N.C., for two days of investigation and evaluation.

Make freely available open government data more accessible and usable.

Develop a 311 system, which is similar to 911 but for nonemergency calls about city services.

Improve enterprise geographic information systems.

Enable online permitting.

As the CIO of Louisville, Niblock had no idea she would be the check mark for item No. 1.

But Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan started courting Niblock shortly after he won his office, trying to convince the 53-year-old to leave the city she'd called home since she was 10. At first, Niblock was having none of it. But the mayor, she said, can be persistent.

He drove down to Louisville to make his case. And by the end of dinner, Niblock was sold. She agreed to come and fix an infrastructure so fundamentally broken that police precincts can't share information, smartphones can't synch with city systems, 70 percent of financial reports are entered by hand, $1 million checks are found hiding in desk drawers, and the tax system was called "catastrophic" by the IRS in an audit.

Welcome to Detroit.

Rebooting the city

For the first eight to 12 months of her tenure, Niblock anticipates she will focus on the decidedly unsexy part of fixing the city's IT infrastructure: new computers, reliable Internet, backup and storage, improving data security. After that, she will turn to the HR and financial management systems, which have to integrate, and getting that data into the cloud.

"The goal of the first year is focusing in on fundamental blocking and tackling," she said. "We don't have the PCs and software to do our jobs or a robust and reliable network to do our job. We need those pieces in place first."

Right now, she is focused on replacing all of the city's computers, 80 percent of which are at least four years old and almost all of which run Windows XP or older. That makes the city's "fleet," as Niblock calls it, obsolete by industry standards. Microsoft doesn't even support XP any longer.

"It's been amazing to watch people work around that," Niblock said. "They don't complain; they just kind of make it happen."

This work may seem slow and incremental to residents, but a measured approach is what helped Niblock overcome challenges when she became the CIO of Louisville in 2003. The city and neighboring Jefferson County had just merged, and Niblock was tasked with integrating the financial, HR and other systems.

"Not everybody had the technology, and not everybody was comfortable with it, so there was a lot that we needed to do," she said.

In Detroit, the situation is even more basic. Niblock is starting from scratch rather than try to integrate systems. Because there has been such wholesale disinvestment and cutbacks in the nearly two decades since the city's last major IT overhaul (See related story), very little infrastructure remains.

For example, it costs the city $62 to cut a payroll check because the system is so manual it takes 149 full-time employees — including 51 uniformed officers — to run it. At a cost of $19.2 million per year.

"I am most grateful that I didn't have to make a lot of the hard cuts during all of that," Niblock said. "They had to make really hard choices. The fact that the team here has kept some systems up and running is fairly miraculous."

The New Orleans experience

When Allen Square started as the CIO of New Orleans in 2010, he found a very similar situation to what Niblock faces. As a member of the White House task force, he recognized immediately some the problems he'd already tackled.

"I see Detroit in a very similar spot as New Orleans," he said. "I walked into a mess. The city of New Orleans had a bad reputation of failed tech projects, billions of dollars thrown away. What I inherited had corruption all around it, though I don't think Detroit IT has this looming glut of corruption."

Nobody has gone to jail over IT in Detroit, despite cost overruns and other challenges; whereas the two New Orleans CIOs preceding Square both pleaded guilty to federal bribery and corruption charges.

To rebuild from that, Square first reached out to other city CIOs for advice. The constant refrain was: Fix your foundation before you build.

"Everything I did for about the first 18 months, except perhaps a new website, was internal focused," he said. "Things were breaking, and I had to get them fixed."

That meant doing the hard thinking. He spent months working with staff to understand the processes and uses for each system. What does something actually need to do? Who is it benefiting? How does it integrate?

"Technologists need to pay attention to what it takes to do the process improvement work," he said. "We often underestimate it or shortchange it because of tight budgets."

Doing that means vendors can sell you systems that don't meet your needs. Or, as often happens on IT projects, the implementation doesn't match the scope of work. (See: Healthcare.gov when it rolled out.)

"If you do the work before you select the tool, you can start to evaluate the tools from a more enlightened perspective," said Square, who is now chief technology and innovation officer at PosiGen Solar Solutions, based in Metairie, La. "You can have more detailed conversations with your vendors about whether the way you are solving an issue could be changed or optimized. Spend the time doing that, you are in a great spot."

First and foremost, though, his advice to Niblock is this: "Resist the tendency to do the sexy projects. Stabilize and build a strong foundation. You're going to get pressure to do other things, but make it clear that you have to stabilize your environment first."

Getting ready for an upgrade

Niblock is working with the mayor and Mary Martin, Detroit's new director of lean process management, to put together teams of city employees and business community volunteers to build streamlined, efficient systems.

"I think people are hopeful, but I think they have been through a lot of roller coasters," Niblock said. "Because the people who are here have been here for a while, they are (in a mindset of) 'trust but verify' because they've heard a lot of these promises before."

Square warns Niblock to always have a department head's buy-in before moving forward with projects. If she can't get that person on board for an upgrade, move on to another priority.

"Don't pull a department with you," he said. "Make sure they are co-leading the project with you. If not, it's a recipe for bad implementation — and those cost millions of dollars in city government. You have to have at minimum a department head that realizes there is a need to replace what we have today and are willing to dedicate their resources and time to getting it done."

That will be critical advice when it comes time to start developing online permitting systems, a more robust website and a consumer-management system, such as 311.

(The city is doing a triage revamp of detroitmi.gov, but a full overhaul is expected in the future.)

Those things all layer on top of a strong IT infrastructure but require multiple departments willing to rethink how they do business. Often, the opposite happens: IT systems are made to fit around broken work flows rather than imaging what could be happening.

"A lot of the systems that cities put in are best in class, but then we customize the heck out of them," Niblock said. "There needs to be resolve to stick to best practices. It helps you all down the line."

Opening up the data

What keeps Niblock pushing forward is the goal of working on two of her passion projects: civic-tech innovation and open data.

"One of the things that is so exciting about Detroit is all the civic tech people," she said.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Rock Ventures LLC committed $500,000 for civic-tech innovation projects, which is allowing her to hire a deputy director to oversee those efforts and build an innovation fund that will make small grants to local civic tech firms. Civic tech generally refers to people using open government data to solve civic problems.

Three of Detroit's most prominent of these types of technology companies are Dandelion, Data Driven Detroit and Loveland Technologies LLC. The latter have become well known because of their work on the Motor City Mapping project, which catalogued and analyzed the city's nearly 400,000 parcels over nine weeks during the winter. That provided the data guiding the city's plan to fight blight.

Crain's asked all three what primary improvement they'd like to see in Detroit's IT. They all said they want the city's data to be more open, transparent and publicly available — preferably for free.

"Rich data is like nutrient-rich soil," said Peter Vanderkaay, director of partnerships and business development at Dandelion. "Opening up the data allows the city to tap into the community of social and civic problem solvers, creating a diversity of solutions that any city government would be hard pressed to develop on its own."

Cities across the country, for example, have made property records open and accessible, allowing Loveland Technologies to expand its local Why Don't We Own This? website (wdwot.com) to more than two dozen locales, from Denver to Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, the Miami-based Knight Foundation has invested $25 million into civic tech innovators since 2010, and reports that 121 companies were founded in 2012.

"What's partly intriguing about Detroit is that it's one thing to build an app that sits on top of a fully functioning IT system that has all the data lined up and works perfect every time, but it's another thing to figure out how tech can help us move forward and maybe even move past those folks (with fully functioning IT departments)," said Katy Locker, the Knight program director for Detroit.

"What can we do to skip steps to get us to a more open-data environment? That is very intriguing nationally to the civic tech community."

It's also an imperative for Niblock. In fact, when the mayor was wooing her, she said, they spoke in depth about the importance of open data and changing the city's default of locking down information. A very basic improvement, she said, will be making Detroit City Council meeting minutes online and easily accessible. She is also discussing how to make the video of the council sessions archived and searchable.

"What we have to do to regain the public trust is be open with our data," she said. "We have something I'm very excited that we are working toward that will be out mid-fall."

But even the civic tech community realizes that Niblock and the city must first take baby steps. As the COO of Loveland, Mary Lorene Carter said she wants the people she works with in city government to be able to communicate and collaborate together easily.

"Right now, many city departments may have a system that works for them, but they can't easily access information that has been collected and curated by another department," she said. "In order to operate a city efficiently, one needs to be able to have access to the all of the relevant information."

IT budget

Of course, all of these dreams come with a price tag.

To cover the bills, the city is counting on the money that Orr set aside in his restructuring plan that is before the bankruptcy court. The emergency manager proposed spending $1.4 billion for service improvements, with nearly 11 percent of that amount — or $152 million — going toward IT.

The bulk — $94.8 million — is going to the finance and HR departments. A total of $21 million is going to fire and police departments because their systems are in as bad of shape, if not worse, than the general services part of the city.

"As of the petition date, the DPD had no IT systems in place at all for such functions as jail management, electronic ticketing and activity logs," according to the plan of adjustment.

Of course, Orr's plan still has to be confirmed in bankruptcy court and there are no guarantees. Still, Niblock is plowing ahead. She anticipates announcing her new deputy soon and is making plans to let the computer contract out for bid.

She still thinks about her dream world, her Eden, she laughs, of when Detroit is a smart, connected city. One where you don't have to blow on your credit card in the cold of February, trying to force a broken parking meter to accept it.

Instead, you could find an open parking spot anywhere in the city and pay for it right from your phone.

Imagine, she said, sipping off her coffee at the Roasting Plant, just imagine.